Poetic Education

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

Every summer, poesiefestival berlin transforms the city into a place for poetry. The festival brings contemporary poetry’s formally diverse world to life and invites artists from around the world to the stage. To mark the 25th poesiefestival berlin, Haus für Poesie is opening this year with a special event to celebrate the international and creative city of Berlin with a diverse program.

05.-15.07.2024, accessible all day

Tresor (outdoors), Köpenicker Straße 70, 10179 Berlin | Free entry

To Have Been A Part (Where Are We Today…) uses spoken recordings of a selection of comments from online videos documenting British raves of the 1980s and 90s. Set with collaged sound elements, they can be experienced via a loudspeaker in the form of a site-specific sound installation on the grounds of the Tresor nightclub.

Kotti-Shop Adalbertstr. 4, 10999 Berlin | Free entry

Kottbusser Tor has a reputation as a space of possibilities, while also being a myth, a place to live, a workplace and a transport hub, a microcosm in its own right. In front of Kotti-Shop, an experimental non-profit art and project space in the middle of the New Kreuzberg Center, various artistic positions enter into an exchange with these multi-layered forms of community and cooperation. With special attention to materials and a feel for surfaces or for the visible and invisible currents of the urban, here, bodies, text and space meet, overlap and translate each other, expose or add to each other, and thus reflect an environment in which everything is constantly changing; with poetic surprise interventions by the Kotti-Shop team throughout the Poets’ Corner period. During this time, the exhibition Alles steuert der Blitz will also be on display daily from 9 p.m. as a window projection on the store front.

 

july 5th – july 15th daily from 9 pm

Kotti-Shop, Adalbertstr. 4, 10999 Berlin | Free entry

Sentences in the urban space as a window projection on the store front.

 

Novilla, Hasselwerderstr. 22, 12439 Berlin | Free entry

We fill our picnic basket and, alongside strawberry jam and redcurrant jelly, await the arrival of the bees – who may join us as four very different voices start this summer day for us. From ten o’clock onwards, the Novilla garden will be open to visitors to take a seat and enjoy poetic breakfast.

 

 

3-6 pm

Upcycling, Hobrechtstr. 54, 12047 Berlin | Free entry

Together we will upcycle old texts and create a textual sculpture. We will copy, print, cut, write, rewrite, paint, glue, weave and, somehow, make it all work – using materials found that day at UPCYCLING Neukölln. We will explore, experiment and discuss what upcycling means for the world and for poetry.

 

 

WerkStadt, Emser Straße 124, 12051 Berlin | Free entry

Under the firmament of an interactive star chart, we traverse lunar to lunatic word formations and survey the poetic space in changing constellations. We peek the moon and blink at the sun. We wait for signals. The stars know more than we do. Our gaze thinks figures between the dots and wonders whether it is reading or writing. We discover clues to our mission in our ascendants. We confuse beginnings and endings. When counting the grains, we hope for an odd number. Even at night we count the red from the sky. We no longer talk to fish. We’re going to reconfigure everything here now.

 

07.-15.07.2024 

ON SUNDAY, JUNE 14 CLOSED!

Opening hours: Mi,Fr,So 10-3 pm 

Myzel, Hufelandstraße 33, 10407 Berlin | Free entry

A device to be played like an instrument: Upon touching a golden cylinder, it will write a random, acoustic verse. Three touches result in a haiku. Playing with words, touching and creating poetry, in community with chance: the Myzel project space offers a stage for new forms, encounters and participation to match the automaton. Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., it is available to visitors as a free space for thought.

open studios from 3 pm 

backsteinboot, Eiswerderstrasse 18 F, 13585 Berlin I 2 € (on site)

A written text does not always exist on its own, but may be placed with, conditioned or shaped by images or photographs. Sound images are also inherent to some text forms. Seeing that we are at Backsteinboot, a studio community on the historic island of Eiswerder, this evening we will explore various influences and materials that are used before, during or after writing. Do come early: the artists will provide insights into their studios and the emphatically recommend refreshing yourself by testing the Spandauer waters surrounding the island.

Kuppelhalle | 4/2 € Tickets

Vocations – open space 2024 will organise four evenings of radically open transdisciplinary experiments and collaborations at the interface between music, sound and poetry at silent green Kulturquartier’s event space Kuppelhalle (29.5. / 8.7. / 9.10. / 3.12.). As a meeting place for Berlin’s contemporary poetry and music scenes, Vocations offers an open space to up to twenty artists to perform at any one time, combining a wide variety of musical and vocal practices based on or rooted in poetry.

Villa Oppenheim, Schloßstr. 55 | Otto-Grünberg-Weg, 14059 Berlin| Free entry

Love poetry is old as the genre itself and to this day, poetry tells of the great pains and joys of love. On this summer evening, we share sorrows and desires in a place that, as an archive and museum, surely has seen some romances in the past. Among others, the Berlin project Lost&Found, which invites authors to write poetic texts based on found black and white photographs, will provide insights into its edition IN LOVE FROM. Love usually goes better with music, so there will be musical interventions as well.

 

Cabuwazi-Zirkus, Wartenberger Str. 175, 13053 Berlin | Free entry

Where artists usually perform their acrobatic feats on a high wire, we will use the space to juggle with words, free from giddiness, and, should the weather hold, next to Cabuwazi circus. While we should manage to avoid close calls, we may still see tension between body and word, whether during the act of writing itself or in the moment of speaking and performing a text. Words may jump between languages and bodies, may maintain or skillfully lose their balance, may stretch, bend or make themselves very small: Clear the stage for poetry.

 

Brotfabrik, Caligariplatz 1, 13086 Berlin | Free entry

Working mothers, old loves, various languages and a sleeping Persian haunt the poems of this evening. Sound plays a crucial role in evoking the absent. A word echoes through the next, one language slumbers in another. Origins remain perceptible as latent vibrations. In some places, silence drips through leaks in the language. Loop stations and sound objects create atmospheres and let text parts float through the Brotfabrik courtyard.

 

 

10 am / Silent Green / Kuppelhalle

Celebrating our otherness! For the fifth time, school classes from all over Germany were invited to engage with the work of an important contemporary English-speaking voice as part of a competition organized by British Council and Haus für Poesie. This year, young people were asked to write a response poem to the poem “The Game” by Scottish poet and spoken word artist Kevin Mclean. Award ceremony with lots of poetry and spoken word.

Haus für Poesie, Knaackstr. 79, 10435 Berlin | Free entry

What are texts beyond the written word? How are they made, how are they recorded, and what is actually speaking? Stoff aus Luft is the first German-language literary magazine that you can experience by listening. A magazine dedicated to spoken and sound-based texts in all their forms, poems, spoken word and sound poetry as well as rap, songs and audio pieces. The magazine was founded in 2022 by Josefine Berkholz and Tanasgol Sabbagh and is musically designed by Fabian Saul. Together with Poets’ Corner, Stoff aus Luft will be presenting a showcase of some of their favorite Berlin Spoken Word artists at poesiefestival berlin 2024.

 

 

 

Galerie im Turm, Frankfurter Tor 1, 10243 Berlin | Free entry

Sleeping and dreaming next to each other is an ancient practice. In the sleeping temples of antiquity, sick people sought healing in their dream images. And even today, lying down in a shared space and in contact with one’s own body and surroundings can be an experience to test our limits, enabling new forms of perception, invention and encounter. With hooops, who invite you to take a collective nap, we enter a threshold space which allows you to relax and open your imagination.

Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin | Free entry

While the great old beech tree that gave this beautiful and traditional festival venue its name rustles its leaves in the summer wind, some of the poets from the Academy of Arts’ literature section will read their poems for us at Buchengarten: Volker Braun, Ann Cotten, Ulrike Draesner, Ursula Krechel, Monika Rinck and Kathrin Schmidt.

 

Performance by the U8 collective: 3 – 6 pm

Bezirkszentralbibliothek Mark-Twain, Marzahner Promenade 54 / 55, 12679 Berlin | Free entry

We follow poetic traces and references to the past and the future, and observe them in their making and during their growth: With its actions, the U8 collective enters into a dialogue with its surroundings. Writing lyrical poetry in chalk, they create texts which resonate in the urban space, on the street and in squares, which enable different perspectives, and which remain close and tangible until the next rain shower. Fleeting as these creations may be, they lead us to further poetic approaches, which will continue the evening as part of a reading from 6 pm.

 

Haus für Poesie | 7/5 € Tickets

The film The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films 2016) by Belinda Schmid and David Welch follows the poet CAConrad to where they grew up in rural America in a small town filled with racism and homophobia.

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

This meeting between Marianna Kiyanovska and Oksana Maksymchuk brings together two Ukrainian poets who write about war and violence in distinctly different and powerful ways.

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

Writing Change is presenting four poets who are trailblazers seeking entirely new ways of expression in their languages.

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets 

A meeting of two generations is taking place during this poetry talk: Kirils Ēcis (born 2000 in Riga) is the youngest poet of the international program and Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (born 1987 in Reykjavik) is one of the most important voices in Icelandic poetry. What unites their poetic practices is a love of experimentation and the use of different artistic disciplines.

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

Writing Identities centers around four poets from different countries who have made a break with traditional gender roles and have found innovative language to do so. With tremendous powers of imagination, they create new modes to express marginalized perspectives and experiences while questioning familiar patterns, ascriptions, modes of representation and presentation, perception, and interpretive authority.

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

Harry Josephine Giles (born 1986 in Orkney) is a poet, performer, and slam champion. In her widely acclaimed work, she transcends genre demarcations and blends them. In doing such, she deconstructs ancient myths or, following in the footsteps of Ursula K. Le Guin, she updates the narrative conventions of science fiction with a gender-fluid cast, most recently in the verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador Poetry 2021), which she wrote in Orkney dialect. It’s a sensual experience that is only accessible through sound at first: “The chime o the tannoy is whit taks her back, / fer hid isno chenged, nae more as the wirds / summoan her tae the airlock: her wirds / at sheu isno heard fer eyght geud year.”

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

Yang Lian and Jan Wagner are two of the most renowned poets of their languages. They have known each other for almost ten years and have translated each other’s work since then. In this event, they’re presenting their poems in both Chinese and German, and will speak about their collaboration, the difficulties of translating poems into another language and another culture, as well as about the power of translations when they succeed.

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

Writing Class addresses classism, which over the last decade has been debated in the German-language literary discourse, especially in relation to various forms of autobiographical essays. For the first time, we are bringing a number of poetic positions on this debate, which has also been held in international poetry for years, to the big stage. Four poets have been invited who approach this topic in very different manners:

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

The discovery of two exciting voices from Korea await visitors to this event. Two poets who defy simple interpretation in their writing and dive into the most beautiful and inscrutable confusion.

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

“Writing, and certainly the writing of a poem, is the same thing as translating, just in reverse order: a gentle probing into the pulsating heart of one’s own text,” writes Anneke Brassinga (born 1948 in Schaarsbergen), the “language magician” (Rob Schouten) of Dutch poetry. Brassinga came to writing through translating—including works by Beckett, Diderot, Nabokov, and Plath—and an ensuing “surplus of verbal energy,” which culminated in her poetry debut Aurora (De Bezige Bij) in 1987. Since then, numerous volumes of poetry, prose, and essays have been published, and in 2016, Matthes & Seitz published her selected poems under the title entitled Fata Morgana, dürste nach uns! in a German translation by Ira Wilhelm and Oswald Egger. Brassinga’s poems are characterized by a sensitive handing of the living “invisible substance” of the poem and by neologisms, forgotten words, and whimsical compounds.

“It isn’t true / you’re just standing / still before a window / the place is almost complete / as if the image came about / because you came along,” writes Erik Lindner (born 1968 in The Hague), yet another outstanding representative of Dutch poetry. In 1996, he made his debut with Tramontane, which was followed by two novels and numerous volumes of poetry, most recently Zog (Van Oorschot 2018) und Hout (Van Oorschot 2024), as well as Nach Akedia (Matthes & Seitz, 2013), the selected poems in the German translation by Rosemarie Still. Lindner’s poems are often characterized by serial snapshots, seemingly disparate observations of images that are as probable as they are not. Through the perception of things and naming them with words, a potential coherence arises, which Lindner nevertheless simultaneously puts into question, “as if he were placing each word in quotation marks” (Ulf Stolterfoht).

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

How does history become embedded in poetry? And how do poets engage with traces of collective or individual memories while addressing the traumas of entire societies that span across generations? What happens with historical sources in poetic work and how does poetry’s power of imagination change the experience of history? Writing Histories introduces four poets who dive deep into history within their texts and explore its diverse impacts on the present.

1 – 6.30 PM | outdoor area silent green | Free entry

The heart of the festival set against a summery backdrop: 40 readings on the festival’s final weekend in silent green’s garden. On Saturday and Sunday from 1 pm to 6.30 pm, you can listen with a soft drink or beer in your hand to poetry from insider tips and award-winning poets and discover new texts together on the lawn in front of the old building.

 

13:00–13:15 Erik Lindner 

13:15–13:30 Sirka Elspaß 

13:30–13:45 Hendrik Jackson 

13:45–14:00 Ana Tcheishvili 

14:00–14:15 Avrina Prabala-Joslin 

14:15–14:30  Alexander Weinstock 

14:30–14:45 Richard Scott

14:45–15:00 Tomás Cohen 

15:00–15:15 Yevgeniy Breyger  

15:15–15:30 Donna Stonecipher 

15:30–15:45 Ilma Rakusa 

15:45–16:00 Matthias Nawrat 

16:00–17:00 Junivers-Special – Gedichte von Kerstin Preiwuß in Übersetzung mit Rike Bolte, Aurélie Maurin, Tanja Petrič, Kerstin Preiwuß und Verica Tričković  

17:00–17:15 Ricardo Domeneck 

17:15–17:30 Anna Bauer 

17:30–17:45 Fedor Pellmann 

17:45–18:00 Jo Mariner

18:00–18:15 Sonja vom Brocke 

18:15–18:30 Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau 

 

 

1 – 7 PM | outdoor area silent green | Free entry

This year, our poetry market is on the Saturday of the festival’s final weekend. Forty publishers and magazines from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland will present and sell their publications under shady trees and in the courtyard of silent green. While browsing, you can get personal advice from publishers and directly interact with your new favorite poets at a number of stands.

 

Antiquariat Bücherbunker Berlin

ATHENA-Verlag

außer.dem

Bübül Verlag

Corvinus Presse

Dagyeli Verlag

Das Wunderhorn

Distillery

Edit

edition AZUR

edition b

Edition Rugerup

Edition Faust

Eichenspinner Verlag

ELIF Verlag

etcetera press berlin

Gesellschaft für zeitgenössische Lyrik e.V.

gutleut verlag

hochroth Verlag

KLAK Verlag

Klingenberg

kookbooks

Lyrik-Edition NEUN

Matthes & Seitz Berlin

MaroVerlag

mosaik

OSTRAGEHEGE

parasitenpresse

Poesiealbum

Propeller Verlag

Quiqueg-Verlag

Rimbaud Verlag

Rotkiefer Verlag

roughbooks / Engeler

SAND

scaneg Verlag

silbende_kunst

Spatzen

Stadtlichter Presse

Sujet Verlag

Transistor – Zeitschrift für zeitgenössische Lyrik

Verlagshaus Berlin

Wallstein Verlag

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

This conversation brings together two of the most celebrated and headstrong poets of today’s British poetry scene:

Fran Lock (born 1982) writes political poems in an emphatic manner that start with the body and read like condensed essays where thoughts collide. One of them is a late-capitalist diatribe dedicated to the late poet Sean Bonney who died young as a form of solace; it expresses hope that somewhere a language exists “for the conditions and the thoughtless finitude of fear.” In another text, Lock considers the possibility of “repair” while also posing existential questions about writing itself: “if writing moves me neither further from my pain nor closer to my death, then where and when is this writing but inside of pain, inside of death?”

The early poems of Kayo Chingonyi (born 1987 in Mufulira, Zambia) recount coming of age in a satellite town north of London and an initiation in the absence of the “original culture” (as the author notes). He speaks of the influence of music (“The songs we wanted to hear/ lived on tapes of pirate radio sets/ or in the first-hand crackle of vinyl”), the color of James Brown’s scream, and his beginnings as a “garage emcee” until the emergence of Eminem ruined everything. The more recent poems move from Zambia to Leeds to London, outlining a genealogy of his family that stretches back to his pregnant great-grandmother. At the same time, a short, very intimate sonnet cycle recounts the history of the emergence and spread of the AIDS virus, which the poets’ parents fell victim to.

 

3 – 6 pm | Kino Betonhalle | Entry free

poesiefestival berlin in its 25^th edition, ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival celebrates 20 years! We showcase highlights from the last ZEBRA-edition. These poetry films take stances against violence, racism, war, and propaganda. They raise uncomfortable questions about the treatment of refugees and political dissidents, about environmental destruction, and gun violence. Dark, tender, challenging, and also humorous, they celebrate small victories over the seemingly inevitable structures of the world. The poetry films are based on poems written by Simon Armitage, Natalla Arsieńnieva, Ariane von Graffenried, Sawako Nakayasu, Raisa Troianker/Zgadka Volodymyr Sosiura and Zhai Yongming, among others.

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) is one of the biggest names in contemporary US American poetry. He has published seven collections of poetry, including the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Lighthead (Penguin Books 2010), and American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin Books 2018), a crown of sonnets that was begun after Donald Trump was elected president. In this volume, Hayes was influenced by Wanda Coleman and breaks the sonnet form apart with twists and turns and playful ambiguities: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” And in his latest volume So To Speak (Penguin Books 2023), Hayes updates rigid poetic forms such as sonnets, ghazals, and sestinas in didactic poems such as “DIY Sestina: What Does This Piece Remind You Of?” This poem is preceded by a tabular template to write descriptions of images in the sestina form. Hayes also uses this resistance to the prescribed formal constraints and norms as a way to produce the content. He frequently collages the voices and experiences of Black artists and from African American history, uniting poetic potential with an exploration of the self: “If you see suffering’s potential as art, is it art or suffering? / If you see life’s potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?”

Betonhalle | 15/10 € Anthology included Tickets

This summer, we are celebrating a night of poetry for the 25th time in Berlin. According to the annals of the capital’s media, the first edition on Potsdamer Platz in 2000 coincided with the sudden onset of a summer cold spell. It was way too dark to read into the anthology, and yet an enthusiastic audience held out until two in the morning.

Opposed to that night’s mythological inception at the turn of the millennium, there are not only warm rooms at Weltklang, but also reading lamps. Since 2023, German and English translations of all the poems read have been published in an anthology that is traditionally limited to people in attendance.

The eight poets from different parts of the world who are taking the stage this evening will read and perform in their original languages, showcasing the intensities that poetry can generate not only in silent reading but also in the spoken word, in the concentration of a poetic voice.

1 – 7 PM | outdoor area silent green | Free entry

The heart of the festival set against a summery backdrop: 40 readings on the festival’s final weekend in silent green’s garden. On Saturday and Sunday from 1 pm to 7 pm, you can listen with a soft drink or beer in your hand to poetry from insider tips and award-winning poets and discover new texts together on the lawn in front of the old building.

 

13:00–13:15 Slata Roschal 

13:15–14:00 Lyrik aus Singapur mit Jennifer Anne Champion, Jonathan Chan und Laura Jane Lee 

14:00–14:15 Rim Battal 

14:15–14:30 Mathias Traxler 

14:30–15:00 Yevgeniy Breyger, Hendrik Jackson, Ilma Rakusa und Anja Utler lesen Übersetzungen von Gedichten Marina Zwetajewas  

15:00–15:15 Karima Shabrang

15:15–15:30 Sandra Burkhardt 

15:30–15:45 Heinz Peter Geißler 

15:45–16:00 Miedya Mahmod 

16:00–16:15 Georg Leß 

16:15–16:30 Fabian Schwamb 

16:30–16:45 Ferdinand Schmatz 

16:45–17:00 Ana Rocío Jouli

17:00–17:15 Ralph Tharayil 

17:15–17:30 Hannah Beckmann 

17:30–17:45 John Sauter 

17:45–18:30 Lyrik aus Kirgistan mit Aigul Adisova, Gulzada Stanalieva und Nurima Ozurbaeva 

18:30–18:45 Jonathan Garfinkel

18:45–19:00 Christian Filips 

 

 

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets 

Two prominent Latin American poets from two generations. Although the poems of the Argentine María Negroni (born 1951 in Rosario) and Mexican Sara Uribe (born 1978 in Querétaro) differ greatly, they both pose similar questions: What does it mean to write a poem today? What means do we have to encounter words that always refer to a reality that has been fragile and deceptive for a long time?

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets 

The experience of living in exile and fleeing from a system that especially oppresses women is something poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mariam Meetra share. After being sentenced to eleven and a half years in prison plus 99 lashes, the poet, author, and activist Fatemeh Ekhtesari (born 1986 in Kashmar, Iran) fled her home country and has been living in Norway since 2017. There, she published two bilingual volumes, زنده نمی مانیم  / Vi overlever ikke (TransFe:r 2020, translated by Nina Zandjani) and زن نیست / Hun er ikke kvinne (Aschehoug 2022, translated by Fatemeh Ekhtesari, Mohammad M. Izadi, and Johanne Fronth-Nygren). Fatemeh Ekhtesari is a member of “Postmodern Ghazal,” the most radical poetic movement in contemporary Iranian literature. In her poems, she updates traditional forms of Persian poetry, such as the ghazal, in the context of Iran’s socially and politically violent present.

In her first volume of poetry in Persian and German Ich habe den Zorn des Windes gesehen (Wallstein Verlag 2023 translated into German by Ali Abdollahi, Susanne Baghestani, Sylvia Geist, and Kurt Scharf), the poet Mariam Meetra (born 1992 in Baghlan, Afghanistan) describes the (inner) toil of exile: the liberation from the restrictions of Afghan society on the one hand, and the longing for Kabul and the feeling of being uprooted on the other. A leitmotif running through these poems is the wind as a symbol of this ambivalence: “The wind severs my roots / And blows them wherever it wants / It plants them in the breast of long winters / In gardens without sunshine.”

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

“Reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel. […] I consider my life evidence. My life is made possible because of my writing, but my writing is made possible because of my reading.” In Watch Your Language, it is not just the poet who is speaking, it is above all the poetry aficionado Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) who is speaking. In short essays, illustrations, poems, diagrams, and game instructions, Hayes traces his life in reading and calls for alertness towards language. In doing so, he presents one possible compendium of American poetry from the previous century and a glowing tribute to the writers he admires—James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wanda Coleman and Yusef Komunyakaa, to name but a few. Hayes does not address his role models with dry biographical accounts but with eclectic portraits teeming with poetic ingenuity. The essay on Russell Atkins, for example, states: “Art should encourage expenditures of beasts buried with candelabras burning elaborately underground.”